Slow going so far in HD145 special election

Voters in Texas’ 145th House District are trickling to the polls for the first week of early voting in a sluggish special election to replace state Sen. Carol Alvarado in the lower chamber.

Four days in, a mere 359 voters have cast ballots in person or by mail, amounting to less than one percent of the district’s registered voters. Polls will remain open each day through Sunday, close Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and reopen Tuesday through Jan. 25.

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The low turnout is typical for special elections, such as last month’s Senate District 6 special election won by Alvarado, D-Houston. Less than 5 percent of registered voters turned out, some of whom are being asked to return to the polls once again.

In that race, Fierro received 23 percent of the vote, bringing her close to a second-place finish but far behind Alvarado’s 50 percent showing.

Even on uniform election dates, turnout tends to run low in District 145, which runs from the Heights through downtown to parts of Pasadena and South Houston. During the 2016 midterms, about 33,500 of the district’s 71,000 registered voters cast ballots, the sixth-lowest vote total of Harris County’s 24 state House districts.

Only Morales and Noriega appear to be raising and spending significant funds on the race, according to campaign finance reports filed this week.

Through Dec. 31, Morales had raised about $20,000, lent herself $5,000 and spent $4,000. She headed into the final month of the race with about $23,000 cash on hand, her finance report showed.

Noriega maintained a similar campaign balance — $22,600 — on Dec. 31, much of which came from $21,750 in personal loans. She reported raising about $5,200 and spent $2,100.

The recent special election in SD06 had 4.69% turnout. If you project that for HD145, you would end up with 3,341 voters in HD145. We’re not exactly on track for that now, but there’s still time.

And time is the single biggest factor in play here. We knew for months there was going to be a special election in SD06 – we knew it since March, when now-Rep. Sylvia Garcia won the Democratic primary for CD29. Now-Sen. Carol Alvarado and Rep. Ana Hernandez announced their candidacies shortly after, and were campaigning all along. We only knew for sure there would be an election in HD145 after Alvarado won that race in December, and only Christina Morales announced her interest in the race in advance of the filing period. Filing ended just eleven days before early voting started. People just haven’t had much time to realize that there’s another election happening, and the candidates have had even less time to tell them.

Another factor is the lack of mail ballots. Of those 359 total votes through Thursday, only two – yes, two – were mail ballots. Only 169 ballots had been mailed out to voters as of Thursday. There were 6,706 votes cast by mail in the SD06 election, nearly 44% of the total turnout. There were 2,405 mail ballots cast in HD145 in the November election, which is only seven percent of the total votes from that election. That’s actually almost the same percentage of mail ballots as there were in SD06 in 2016, so the difference is not how many mail voters there are, it’s how many of them requested and returned ballots for the special election. I have to assume that’s a function of campaigns, and that’s a tall order when your campaigns have so little time. It’s also a factor of money, which most of these campaigns don’t have, but Alvarado and Hernandez did going into their race.

So yes, the turnout is going to be tiny, and that makes the outcome more random than it would be in a different context. The runoff will involve more time – they’re about five weeks after the first round special election – and more money as the donor class has a clearer idea of who they might want to support. That leads to higher turnout in those races. For now, we’re up to 492 total votes cast as of Friday, five of which came via mail. We’ll see where we are in a week.